What happens when a drive fails on a Pegasus Promise R6 RAID

We love Promise Pegasus R6 RAIDS. Lots of capacity, a fast Thunderbolt connection and they are (pretty) reliable. Spinning disks do go wrong, so what happens if your R6 has a hard drive failure?

The Pegasus R6 was one of the first peripherals to have a Thunderbolt connection on the back. Apart from a Thunderbolt pass through and a mains connector, that's all there is on the back!

The RAIDs are a great way to have lots of fast storage (up to 24TB in a single unit) connected to any Mac that supports a Thunderbolt connector, yes MacBook Air included. They can be looped together, so as you can see from the picture below 50 Terabytes at the side of a desk isn't uncommon!

They are built up from 6 traditional spinning hard disks and every now and then one will fail. This is exactly what happened to our good friend Philip Johnston who runs HDWarrior. We shared his pain during numerous telephone conversations when he explained that a large FCPX project that he had been working on was now at risk.

So what do you do when a drive fails in a Promise Pegasus R6?

Philip Googled and Googled but couldn't find anything. The PDF manual is very detailed, maybe too detailed and too technical for somebody who just wants to change a bad drive. Quickly.

So Philip phoned up Promise support and got help. The video that he made explains all...

So Philip is back up and running, all credit to Promise for the excellent technical support.